Roots

A history of Jamaican music. Seemings that I'm rocking the roots manuva so much at the moment I figured I'd throw some country-of-origin information at you. The dub (can you feel that bass?) and ragga influence on Mr Rodney Smith (roots manuva) and his music is awfully strong, as it should be. When I was but a younger lad than I am now I was listening to alot of jungle (where drum and bass orginated from) which was heavily influenced by raggamuffin ( what with jungle being the UK version of hiphop in that it represented a black musical underground, or what would be called 'urban' these days *bleugh* ) although I really didn't know that at the time being a young naive kiddie deep in the heart of North Yorkshire.

Chris tells of coffeeshops in Amsterdam that are very 'roots', in that if you ain't black and your in there j00z gonna get battered if your not careful. This negative connotation doesn't represent the whole of roots culture, but I'm sure is a part of it. Having not experienced it I cannot really comment.
( it should be noted that chris is biiiiig into his dub and reggae which is cool, unless your trying to make music with him and you want the sound to be a little more punk )

And as for the rampant homophobia in reggae at the moment, well... it ain't good, is it? Being batty in Jamaica will get you killed, which is kinda lame.

On a personal note I used to get accused of being batty alot in highschool for being strange, in a predominately white school, which I guess shows how deeply entrenched in british youth culture the jungle/ragga/roots influence is. That's why you have townies (scally, chav, whatever) walking around talking like yardies.

Fuck, this was supposed to be a celebratory post, but it's ending on a bit of a negative tone. Oh well.